“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In an effort to reassure her, I looked up what Seth said in Chapter 9 of Personal Reality, and showed it to her. See the 637th session: “… think now of the life of the self as one message leaping across the nerve cells of a multidimensional structure — again, as real as your body — and consider it also as a greater ‘moment of reflection’ on the part of such a many-sided personality … I am aware that [these analogies] can make you feel small or fear for your identity. You are more than a message, say, passing through the vast reaches of a superself. You are not lost in the universe.”

The experience of any given unit, constantly changing, affects all other units … Give us time … It is difficult to explain because your concepts of selfhood are so limited … These units contain within themselves, in your terms, all “latent” identities, but not in a predetermined fashion. Selves may be quite independent within the framework of their own reality, while still being a part of a larger reality in which their independence works not only for their own benefit, but for the sake of a greater structure.

Within these units there is, again, a propensity for growth and organization. Within a literally infinite field of activity, meaningful order arose out of the propensity for significance. Briefly, certain units would settle upon various kinds of organization, find these significant, then build upon them and attract others of the same nature. So were various systems of reality formed. (Pause.) The particular kind of significance settled upon would act both as a directive for experience and as a method of erecting effective boundaries, within which the selected kind of behavior would continue. The units can and do intermix, yet because of the propensity for selectivity and significance, whole groups of them will “repel” other whole groups, thus providing a protective inner system of interaction.

The units form themselves into the various systems that they have themselves initiated. They transform themselves, therefore, into the structured reality that they then become. Ruburt is quite correct in his supposition of what he calls “multipersonhood” in Adventures.¹

You think of one I-self (spelled) as the primary and ultimate end of evolution. Yet there are, of course, other identities with many such I-selves, each as aware and independent as your own, while also being aware of the existence of a greater identity in which they have their being. Consciousness fulfills itself by knowing itself. The knowledge changes it, in your terms, into a greater gestalt that then tries to fulfill and know itself, and so forth. There have been experiments upon your earth (by consciousness) with both men and animals at a different level than just mentioned, but with that in mind — herds of animals, for example, with each animal quite aware of the joint knowledge of the herd, the dangers to be encountered in any individual territory, and a psychological structure in which the mass consciousness of the herd recognized the individual consciousness of each animal, and protected it.

The same thing with variations happened with your own race, and for that matter is happening. In the past as you think of it historically, several groups experimented along those lines. At those times the individual consciousness became so entranced with its own experiences, however, that the clear-cut, steady, and conscious communication with the mass consciousness went underground, so to speak. It became available to those who looked for it, but the same kinds of psychological organization did not result on those occasions.²

It is quite possible, for example, for several selves to occupy a body, and were this the norm it would be easily accepted. That implies another kind of multipersonhood, however, one actually allowing for the fulfillment of many abilities of various natures usually left unexpressed. It also implies a freedom and organization of consciousness that is unusual in your system of reality, and was not chosen there.

In some systems of physical existence, a multipersonhood is established in which three or four “persons” emerge from the same inner self, each one utilizing to the best of its abilities those characteristics of its own. This presupposes a gestalt of awareness, however, in which each knows of the activities of the others, and participates; and you have a different version of mass consciousness. Do you see the correlation?

In the systems in which evolution of consciousness has worked in that fashion, all faculties of body and mind in one “lifetime” are beautifully utilized. Nor is there any ambiguity about identity. The individual would say, for example, “I am Joe, and Jane, and Jim, and Bob.” There are physical variations of a sexual nature, so that on all levels identity includes the male and female. Shadows of all such probabilities appear within your own system, as oddities. Anything apparent to whatever degree in your system is developed in another.

The point of all this is that these units are unpredictable, and fulfill all probabilities of consciousness. Any concepts of gods or other beings that are based upon limited ideas of personhood will ultimately be futile. You view the fantastic variety of physical life — its animals, insects, birds, fish, man and all his works — with hardly a qualm; yet you must understand that the nature of consciousness itself is far more varied, and you must learn to think of an inner reality that is as infinite as the exterior one. These concepts alone do alter your present consciousness, and change it in degree. The present idea of the soul, you see, is a “primitive” idea that can scarcely begin to explain the creativity or reality from which mankind’s being comes. You are multipersons (intently). You exist in many times and places at once. You exist as one person, simultaneously. This does not deny the independence of the persons, but your inner reality straddles their reality, while it also serves as a psychic world in which they can grow.³

Your idea of one soul, one self, forms a significance and a selectivity that blinds you to these other realities that are as much “here and now” as your present self. The units of consciousness that compose your physical being alone are aware of those greater significances, to which your limited ideas make you opaque.

The concepts in such a system as this can help break those barriers. There are, then, stratas of consciousness existing at once. The ones you are not aware of yet seem more progressed, developed than your own. You are a part of them now. You can know them as you begin to stretch your concepts of personhood and awareness. In terms of time you have many bodies, as you are born and reborn in earth experience. Your consciousness straddles those existences, and even the atoms and molecules within your present body contain the coded knowledge of those other (really simultaneous) forms. These units of consciousness are within all physical matter, containing their own memories. Both biologically and psychically, then, you are aware of your multipersonhood.

(With emphasis:) Reincarnation simply represents probabilities in a time context (underlined) — portions of the self that are materialized in historical contexts. Period. All kinds of time — backward and forward — emerge from the basic unpredictable nature of consciousness, and are due to “series” of significances. Each self born in time will then pursue its own probable realities from that standpoint. Again, each such self is immediate.

(11:10. Long pause during a strong delivery.) That godhood is formed from the eternal yet ever-new emergence and growth of those basic units of consciousness. The reality of the godhood straddles the reality of each unit, and the mass reality of all units.

(“I don’t know,” Jane said. “The material doesn’t seem like a book, but when I started getting stuff in my sleep after the last two sessions, I did wonder …” I had to laugh: She hadn’t mentioned her own suspicions to me. At the same time I thought she might be putting up barriers to the idea of another Seth book so soon, since we still have editorial work to do for the last one, Personal Reality [see Note I for the 682nd session]. “Maybe these sessions are for your own writing,” Jane speculated. “I love them, though — but another book? Now?”

(3. “It would be nice if Seth would say something about the dream I had the night before last, in which I think I contacted my [deceased] mother for the second time.” Yesterday I wrote an account of the experience for use in the book I’ve started on my own: Through My Eyes. Seth broached the idea of Through My Eyes in Chapter 6 of Personal Reality. I enjoy working on the project, and have had particularly strong urges to do so since the death of my mother three months ago. In writing about my parents, I discovered that I wrote about my own childhood. See the notes preceding the 679th session; the questions I asked then helped initiate this series of sessions.

Now: (Louder and deeper:) “The ‘Unknown’ Reality (colon): A Seth Book.” And put “Unknown” in quotes.

(“Yes … You mean I can use your book in connection with my own writing.”)

(Pause, eyes wide, staring at me.) Now for your dream. You are of course making contact with your mother. She is beginning to stir, as you surmised. Ruburt’s (written) comments about the dream are also pertinent, showing your own caution. None of these encounters have been normally emotional ones, for example, but glimpses in which there was no communication in ordinary terms.

It may interest you to know that your athletic tendencies are somewhat involved in your out-of-body travel, in that it seems to you that the body must be poised and balanced, and have support — hence the hallucinations you use. You can use those tendencies to help you, however, if you think in terms of a completely free body, able to move unsupported in space, capable of manipulations in the dream state that are denied it in physical reality. The “inner” body can perform in ways that the physical body cannot, and you can use that as a challenge. Find out what you can do with your inner body; experiment.

(“All right. Good night, Seth.” 11:50 P.M. Then a minute later, as we talked about “Unknown” Reality, Jane briefly dipped back into trance:)

(“It sure doesn’t start out like a book to me,” Jane said. “It doesn’t seem to be simple, like the others. Maybe this time he’s going to go ahead and do it his own way … I can honestly say that the title was completely unknown to me.” She smiled at her unwitting pun on “Unknown” Reality. “Are you ready to start a new book, Rob?”

(“If it’s a source book for me, it can be for others, too.” I added that I didn’t care how “tough” or difficult a book it might be — if such was needed to get Seth’s ideas across, then okay. Again, I had to laugh at Jane. It was obvious that she was pleased with this new project, that the successes of Seth Speaks and Personal Reality had given her a strong confidence in Seth’s and her own abilities; yet she was starting right in with questions:

1. Jane uses “multipersonhood” on the last page of Chapter 11 in her Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology. “But really,” she said, “the whole chapter builds up toward that definition, or idea.” In her view, the quality called multipersonhood encompasses all of the inner personifications, or Aspects, of the source self, which she defines in the Glossary of Adventures as “the ‘unknown’ self, soul, or psyche; the fountainhead of our physical being.” In her own case, then, Seth would be a personification of an Aspect of her source self; but he would also have an existence of his own at other levels of reality.

2. In connection with Seth’s discussion of animals and men here, see his excellent material in Chapter 12 of Personal Reality. Summarizing parts of that chapter very simply: In Session 647 Seth goes into the challenges early man faced as he contended with his own burgeoning consciousness. In Session 648 he discusses animal instinct, health, illness, and suicide, and the eras during which men and animals mixed. For the same session Jane contributed impressions of her own on animal medicine men.

3. A note added later: I found most of the material Seth had delivered since 10:11, but especially at this point, to be strongly reminiscent of a passage in the 657th session in Chapter 15 of Personal Reality. I’ve put together these excerpts from that session: “Each of your reincarnational selves has its own ‘points of power,’ or successive moments, in which it materializes daily existence in a linear manner from all the probabilities available to it. In a way that will be explained in another book, there is a kind of coincidence with all of these present points of power that exists between you and your ‘reincarnational’ selves. There is a constant interaction in this multidimensional point of power, therefore, so that in your terms, one incarnated self draws from all of the others what abilities it wants. These selves are different counterparts [my emphasis] of yourself in creaturehood, experiencing bodily reality; but at the same time your organism shuts out the simultaneous nature of experience.”

Jane and I placed no particular emphasis upon this information when Seth came through with it, but in retrospect we realized that it contains two significant points: Seth’s reference to “another book,” which we think is “Unknown” Reality, and his use of the word “counterparts.” In its ordinary dictionary sense, the term has appeared a few times in the sessions, but Seth’s use of it in the passage quoted above has a special implication, I think; one that Jane and I missed at the time of its reception. For in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, Seth’s concept of counterparts certainly takes on its own unique meaning within his study of personhood. (Although not bringing up his ideas of reincarnation or points of power in the 683rd session, Seth implied both of those qualities in many parts of that material.)

As I write this note, I’m struck by a curious connection I feel but find almost impossible to explain in words, let alone simply — that while Seth’s mention of “another book” in Session 657 may refer to “Unknown” Reality, it’s also echoed in the first question I asked Jane at break in tonight’s session. Yet how can this be, I wonder, since when the 683rd session was held I didn’t have Session 657 in mind; and when the 657th was delivered I had no ordinary way of knowing I’d have the question to ask in the 683rd. I’m unwilling to ascribe the “conventional” notions of precognition or retrocognition to such a tenuous relationship between the two sessions. Such odd connections have arisen before in the Seth material. Usually I simply recognize their existence and my inability to think clearly about them, and go on from there.

“Linden and his wife were close to their present physical ages in the dream, a year or so younger than I am, at 54, but Stella looked to be a few years younger than she should have been [she died at 81]. I know I created my dream image of her to make our communication understandable to me — yet I felt that she was alive, in our terms and in hers. My mother was obviously in control of her faculties, even though she appeared to be a little distraught … The fact that she looked past me speaks of some sort of barrier, or distance, between us even in the dream state. This could be for my own protection, I think….”